Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Goldberg: Realignment Works

Special to The Bee

Published Tuesday, May. 29, 2012

A year into Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to realign public safety,
the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has produced a vision
of "The Future of California Corrections," whose plans, not
surprisingly, are mirrored in the recent May revise budget. The plan is
an attempt to overhaul and redirect a prison system that has been
floundering for at least a decade, but it doesn't go far enough.

A
year ago we heard fear-mongering voices warning of dangerous criminals
being released and counties too broke to provide jail space, parole
officers or programming for realigned prisoners.

One year in,
how's realignment actually working out? The number of people held in
state prison has dropped by more than 25,000 in 16 months since Brown
has been in office. The count of people on parole is down almost 30,000,
and the number of people held in private out-of-state prisons is down
10 percent; all that without a spike in crime.

The crime rate continues to fall and putting fewer people in state
prisons means saving tax dollars, and given the $15.7 billion gap
forecast in the May revise those savings have never been needed more
than they are now. CDCR estimates that it is saving $1.5 billion a year
through realignment and will save another $2.2 billion a year by
canceling $4.1 billion in new construction projects.

As we see
budgets slashed for In-Home Supportive Services, poor families being
pushed out of child care and off Medi-Cal, and fewer high school
graduates being able to afford to attend our public higher education
system, we know where the money is needed.

Based on an encouraging
first year, can we expect further parole and sentencing reforms
resulting in even more reductions in corrections spending in the next
few years? Unfortunately, some are making other plans.

Realignment
is an idea that was floating around the Capitol when I arrived in 2000.
The U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce deadly overcrowding in our
prisons provided political cover for the meek and a political
opportunity for the bold to turn around a bloated corrections system. So
why is CDCR proposing to raise the population cap to 145 percent of
capacity and build $810 million worth of new prison beds?

In my
years in Sacramento, I saw that CDCR had developed a culture of
construction. Got a problem? Build a new prison. As a Los Angeles
native, I understood the culture of construction, familiar from decades
of freeway building in Southern California. "Freeways crowded? Build
more" was common sense for too long. Now we understand that new freeways
will get crowded soon and that we need to invest in a culture and
infrastructure of affordable public transit, and in housing people close
to where they work.

Building more freeways wasn't the answer; it
was the problem. We're just beginning to understand that about prisons
and jails. Building all those prisons also meant borrowing billions – a
big part of the wall of debt that Brown is trying to chip away at by
cutting from health and human services, and education.

Fear of
further expanding that debt has led the nonpartisan Legislative
Analyst's Office to recommend the Legislature consider closing prisons
and act on alternatives to CDCR's plan to build more.
As the
Legislature examines CDCR's "Future of California Corrections" and the
governor's May revise budget, the question is whether the Legislature
takes steps to complete the turn away from 30 years of disastrous
corrections policies or blindly shifts overcrowding and jail expansion
to our 58 counties. If the proposed $500 million for new or bigger jails
makes it through the budget process, we'll know which direction our
elected officials have chosen.

Corrections built prisons, but it
was the Legislature that filled them with hundreds of laws that created
new crimes and lengthened sentences. Serious sentencing and parole
reforms are long overdue and communities, advocates, and other experts
throughout the state have been providing ideas of where to start for
decades.

An easy step could be to address the rapidly aging
population by implementing a geriatric parole process, and expanding
medical parole and compassionate release. Other options include passing
legislation to decriminalize drug possession, or supporting the
initiative to reform the "three strikes" law on the November ballot. We
need only the political will to move away from sentencing and parole
policies that have done more to bankrupt our state treasury than to
secure safety in our neighborhoods.

Do we return to the course of
expanding prisons and jails and expanding the percentage of our
resources that go to filling them? Or do we take realignment as only a
first step toward further downsizing, offering us the opportunity to use
tax funds to invest in the well being of our residents now and in the
future? I advocate for the latter.

Jackie Goldberg, a former Assembly member from Los Angeles, served on the Public Safety Committee.

1 comment:

The passing of the responsibility from the state to local governments has had a dismal effect on community correction agencies like Los Angeles county probation. They were I'll prepared for releases that had no place to live, no place to receive assistance for job placement and especially important no place to send recent releases to address and correct their failure to adapt to societal issues. This was an attempt to move the problems of a over burden state parole system to a local government system...this was no great efford by the governor to readdress a mistake in our ways of viewing an Arctic correctional system.

About Us

We are faculty members and students at UC Hastings College of the Law, affiliated with the Hastings Institute for Criminal Justice. Our posts reflect our respective personal opinions and analyses of correctional and criminal justice policies.